No, but famously early IBM clones had to do clean-room reverse engineering of bootloaders and other ancillary code to produce compatible designs.
IBM was able to legally annihilate anyone who ever saw the source code or read technical documents on these designs, but the people who made sure they didn't were able to defend their designs in court.
If you've worked in IP-heavy fields (my experience is with video codecs) you will also see strict guidance to not read patents in your day-to-day.
IBM was able to legally annihilate anyone who ever saw the source code or read technical documents on these designs, but the people who made sure they didn't were able to defend their designs in court.
If you've worked in IP-heavy fields (my experience is with video codecs) you will also see strict guidance to not read patents in your day-to-day.